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The Pope has beatified a group of 233 Catholics who died in the Spanish civil war in the 1930s.
Thousands of Spanish pilgrims were in Rome for Sunday's ceremony at the Vatican.
The new blesseds are mostly Spanish priests, monks and nuns from the province of Valencia, who died under republican fire or were murdered in an anti-clerical campaign by leftists at the beginning of the war.
 The Catholic church backed General Franco |
The decision by the Pope to publicly venerate the memory of these particular victims of war has strong political undertones.
The Catholic church supported General Francisco Franco's right-wing forces in Spain in the bitterly-fought civil war during which a total of more than 4,000 priests, 2,000 monks and nearly 300 nuns were among those killed by left-wingers.
Franco won the war, which claimed a total of half-a-million lives, and went on to rule Spain for 36 years.
The church insists that the new martyrs are being honoured for their religious faith, not their political creed.
Pope John Paul has created 1,600 new saints and blesseds - more than any of his predecessors.
He believes that the church in this way honours the sacrifice of the lives of uncounted numbers of those who died for their faith during the wars of the 20th Century.
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